Ebay and PayPal Splitting. Why is This a Good Thing?

Ebay and PayPal have been together since 2002, when Ebay decided to acquire PayPal for $1.5 billion. At that moment both companies were heavy weights in their respective fields and growth was booming. Ebay struggled with a previous solution, called Billpoint, until deciding to give in and purchase PayPal.

Since then, both gained a lot from the other. Ebay benefited from PayPal’s ease of use and helped its customers send money to one another. This helped streamline and secure the purchase process, thus increasing transactions. PayPal, one the other hand, piggy backed on Ebay’s massive user base and international exposure. Its revenue increased by the year and in the second quarter of 2014, it amounted to 45% of Ebay Inc’s total revenue.

The fast growth of PayPal, as well the whole “payments revolution” potential lead Carl Icahn to propose a split between Ebay and PayPal this year. Icahn’s proposal / attack was then fended off by Ebay CEO John Donahoe and PayPal ex-leader David Marcus. Since february 2014, a lot of things happened. David Marcus left the company to join Facebook and biggest of the biggest, tech mammoth Apple launched the Apple Pay. What seemed like a closed case soon turned into a huge split between the companies.

Now – John Donahoe will still run Ebay Inc until the split is official. As of that moment he will step down as CEO and Ebay will be lead by Devin Wenig, now president of eBay Marketplaces. PayPal will split into a new company, directed by Dan Schulman, now president at American Express, Enterprise Growth Group.

PayPal benefits from Ebay Inc. spliting. The split means that PayPal will be able to roam free, grow and develop independently. On the other hand Ebay will be able to … well … do everything it was doing before. The marketplace division is not gaining much from the split. It loses a revenue stream, its shares will drop and it will have to find a new way to keep up with its growth in the future.

However PayPal needs independence to keep up with increasing competition in the omnichannel payments landscape. It needs to innovate, it has to connect online and offline and it has to do a bit better on mobile devices. The split will help the company evolve and here are three reasons why:

1. PayPal can mean more than just payments

Banking as we know is shifting from an old, rigid system to a new way of doing business. That means more than wiring money. It means deposits, it means financing, it means Peer 2 Peer Lending and more. Under Ebay, PayPal was bound to stick to payments and money transfers. Now that Ebay is no longer the umbrella that fosters PayPal innovation, we may soon see more financial goodies from PayPal.

2. PayPal should be more than an accessory to Ebay

Elon Musk explained best why Ebay should not hold PayPal back: “It doesn’t make sense that a global payment system is a subsidiary of an auction website… It’s as if Target owned Visa or something”.

The fact is PayPal outgrows Ebay. It can and should be a global financial company, a field that’s obviously larger than Ebay’s marketplaces can ever be.

3. PayPal could grow even faster as a separately traded company

It’s no secret that Ebay has already done what it could to help PayPal. Now it’s just living off PayPal’s growth. As a separately traded company PayPal can become a larger company, more attractive to investors, which in turn can help the company finance its expansion, growth and fight against Apple, Google, Amazon and even AliBaba.

But …

Carl Icahn is known as a corporate raider and maybe there’s more to this story than meets the eye. There is a possibility that he and others are just splitting the company to later organize a take over from companies such as Visa, MasterCard or one of the larger banks. What could be a profitable short-term strategy could hurt PayPal in the long run and kill one of the most promising financial companies in the world.